A brief emergency for the Emergency 911 system. At 11 a.m. today, the 911 wireless and landline services went down forcing the Guam Fire Department to issue an emergency announcement.

It took about an hour and a half for the telecom service provider to make the necessary repairs to their equipment.

GFD confirmed it was back in service before 1 p.m.

This comes just before the one year mark since GFD opened the new NextGen 911 Call Center.

Fire Spokesperson Lt. Nick Garrido said the company provided the service for the system is assessing what went wrong.

“Though it is a modern system, it does through software updates. So those are things that may happen. However, we want to make sure we inform the public we do have a failover system - meaning that when the 911 system, just like if a natural disaster were to happen and our 911 system goes down, we have a failover which automatically pushes our phone lines and the 911 calls to another area basically a coup site. That coup site is operational currently. We did have a little gap when the system shut down. However, though it is fully operational,” said Garrido.

He added, “Rest assure, that the 911 system on Guam is top notch. It is the best system that is the current and modern system out there. Just like anything else we may come across some issues. However, we do have policies and protocols in place that allow us to perform continuity and a backup plan.”

GFD’s alert also included a complete list of emergency numbers as a backup for those that were unable to get through to 911.

We have those contact information for you below.